Shane Del Rosario used to have a problem early in his mixed-martial-arts career.

Early in his fights, he would come out too quickly. Even though he had been training fulltime for nearly a year before he took his first fight and was well prepared, the pace was foreign to him.

Strange, perhaps, for a kid who grew up in Orange County to not be relaxed.

But that’s the thing about his background, Del Rosario will say. Even though there are perceptions about those from this cozy community of Laguna Niguel, his time there didn’t make him lazy or weak.

Hence the rushing out. For the first few fights, it was truly a problem.

“I went out crazy and would try to knock the guy out right away,” Del Rosario told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “My only loss, in a Muay Thai fight, I wasn’t relaxed, and I got caught with a head kick. I got intense. I just gassed myself.

“Now my main focus is strength and relaxing.”

The method has worked. In winning all eight of his professional MMA fights, the 26-year-old Del Rosario has earned a place on the Strikeforce Challengers main card on Nov. 6 in Fresno, Calif., where he will fight 5-0 Brandon Cash.

Del Rosario got the opportunity as he feels his career is rising. He was fortunate, he says, in that he was able to begin training fulltime by taking a teaching job at the gym and gaining help from his parents, who provided his comfortable upbringing in California.

But he has also taken advantage of the opportunity. In taking seven of his eight victories in the first round, Del Rosario has shown that, even though he has calmed his nerves, he still works quickly.

“I feel like I have a lot of work to do and need more fights to prepare myself,” Del Rosario said, “but hopefully in the next year or two, I can become a top contender for a belt. Hopefully that’s Strikeforce or maybe in a few years even in the UFC.”

Cozy, but not weak

The town is called Laguna Niguel, and it sits in Orange County as a mostly well-off community of successful families. This is where Del Rosario was raised by his parents, who grew up knowing only hard work.

His father hailed from tiny Lanai, Hawaii, where he grew up working on a pineapple plantation before moving to Montana to play college football. There, he met Del Rosario’s mother, where she, too, was raised in a small, nose-to-the-grindstone community.

Del Rosario’s father eventually earned higher degrees and became the CEO of a semiconductor company while his mother took work as a paralegal.

He will acknowledge that he didn’t have the type of difficult upbringing that many in the MMA community did. But, it instilled a different kind of pressure, he said.

“It’s motivation to work even harder to provide for my kids,” Del Rosario said. “Since it’s been a good life, there’s the motivation to stay there, or to do even better.”

He was a star athlete, mainly in basketball, and he was physical at that. He guarded bigger players, and he fought for his space. It was perhaps natural, then, that Del Rosario began dabbling in MMA training while a junior in high school.

He attended the University of California-Irvine and studied psychology. He also worked to continue his MMA training, which was difficult because of his dedication to his studies.

“Midterms or finals would come up, and I would be out of the gym for a few weeks,” he said.

The gym would soon enough be his life.

Fulltime fighter

When he finished college, Del Rosario considered graduate school. But, he heard from enough people who were part of his training that he had enough skill to be successful if he committed himself.

So, he did. For the past four years, he has either taught or trained at Team Oyama, an Irvine gym run by Colin Oyama, who has trained Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Tito Ortiz.

Because of his teaching job, he was able to focus on fighting and progress faster than some. Oyama stressed patience before beginning a fighting career.

“I was training, but we also do a lot of hard sparring,” Del Rosario said. “Then I started in with smokers, amateur Muay Thai fights, three of those. I planned to get to 10, but King of the Cage came up.”

That was August 2006, and Del Rosario dispatched Gabor Nemeth with a first-round TKO at a KOTC show. Then, he was a professional fighter sooner then he had planned.

After winning at three EliteXC shows, Del Rosario was 5-0 as of September 2008 and gaining steam. He then went worldwide, heading to M-1 events in Japan, Korea and Russia.

Now, it’s Strikeforce. With an eye toward proving that his training has been complete and effective, including his increased attention to jiu jitsu and wrestling, Del Rosario hopes to take his next MMA step.

“The competition is getting better, and I can feel the fights getting bigger,” he said. “I’m getting to that point where I feel like I’m about to turn a corner.

“It’s kind of an exciting time.”

Award-winning newspaper reporter Kyle Nagel is the lead features writer for MMAjunkie.com. His weekly “Fight Path” column focuses on the circumstances that led fighters to a profession in MMA. Know a fighter with an interesting story? Email us at news [at] mmajunkie.com.

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